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What you're looking for is the definition of the Casting Time entry in a spell's description, on page 129 of the Player's Handbook. (Segments are from AD&D 1st edition and aren't relevant if you're playing AD&D 2nd edition.) The relevant part on that page is:
If only a number is given, the casting time is added to the caster's initiative die ...

AD&D took an interesting approach to this—the classes don't advance in levels at the same pace. It is still likely a level N wizard will be more powerful than a level N fighter, but if a fighter and a wizard have the same amount of XP, then the wizard will be of a lower level than the fighter.
This is most evident when comparing the Wizard and the ...

A More Gradual Power Curve
In 2e (and 1e and Basic), though it's still a thing (by design) that fighter types are more powerful early in the game and wizards more powerful late in the game, it's less of a dramatic gap between the two because the power curves are more gradual in general. Similarly, the difference between levels isn't as extreme (a level 7 ...

Stats for purchased dogs
The dog available for purchase from a kennel, as listed in the equipment chapter, has the statistics of a war dog in the Monster Manual or Monstrous Manual under Dog, and is a little bit beefier than a wild dog. The difference between the three is in what they are trained to be able to do, not in their statistics.
Dogs don't gain ...

I played many years of 2e and have read the 5e PHB, Basic set, and Hoard of the Dragon Queen, so I think I can give some good points of comparison. (I'm excluding the Skills & Powers stuff in late 2e from this discussion, that was less like 2e than many other versions of D&D...)
There are definitely similarities between 2e and 5e — mostly conceptual ...

At very high levels spellcasters do become significantly more powerful than noncasters. However, compared to 3rd edition there are some important differences.
For one thing, there is no Concentration skill and no 5 foot step. Also you have to announce your intention to cast a spell at the begining of the round. If anything hits you before it is your turn, ...

Chapter 6 on Weapons on Weapon Size says that
A character can always wield a weapon equal to his own size or less. Normally this requires only one hand, except for some missile weapons.... A character can also use a weapon one size greater than himself, although it must be gripped with two hands. (Player's Handbook (1995) 96)
Thus, for example, a ...

1. Do Characters in 2e regenerate hit points for extremely high constitutions: Yes.
According to the AD&D Player's Handbook on Page 15, starting at a constitution of 20, you regenerate health every 1/6 turns. Increasing to 1/5 at 21, 1/4 at 22, and so on until every turn at 25.
2. Is this present in 4e / 5e: No
Regenerating hit points every round is ...

Undefined and up to the DM. This is a feature, not a bug!
In AD&D, both editions, magic items are the exclusive domain of the DM and they are given full rein in deciding how they work, which is to say:
If you're the DM, the game doesn't care, so make up whatever sounds good.
If you're a player, you have to ask your DM, or (more likely) experiment with ...

Lots of classes in older D&D were not balanced to each other, and not balanced at every level of play.
One of the main advantages that 2E monks had with the wacky unarmed combat tables was decent odds of getting knockouts or stuns - they had better chance of bumping up and down the results on the table, giving you some advantage there or of ...

The 2 indicates that it has a weight of 2 pounds.
Actually, you missed the row. The blowgun weights 2 pounds. The dart has a weight of * which means 10 of them weight 1 pound. Just in case you wonder when it comes to other items, ** means this weights so little that you can carry an unlimited amount with you.
The S says that it is a small item?
...

I believe this is the Lock Lurker from several AD&D 2e publications. It was first featured in Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood's regular column, "The Dragon's Bestiary," in Dragon magazine #139 (Nov 1988, pp. 70-71). Next, Greenwood put it in the Forgotten Realms adventure Haunted Halls of Eveningstar (1992), and then the Forgotten Realms Campaign ...

Yes, if the mage casts sleep centred on herself, and there at no lower-HD creatures nearby which soak up the effect before it affects the mage, she will fall asleep.
The spell effect doesn't come into being until the spell is complete, so the sleep spell's effect certainly won't prevent itself from coming into effect.

For tools to implement non-standard PC races, you want the AD&D 2nd edition The Complete Book of Humanoids (1993). An excerpt of the back blurb:
This handbook describes in detail over 20 humanoid races that can be run as player characters — from mischievous pixies to stubborn minotaurs, from lizardlike saurial to the savage half-ogre — and many more ...

Handedness is based on the size of the weapon compared to the size of the character. Same size and smaller requires 1 hand, one size larger requires 2 and 2 sizes larger cannot be wielded.
If it's large and you are size medium then the weapon requires two hands.

You use the best progression from your two classes. Player's Handbook, "Multi-CLass Benefits and Restrictions", page 44, last paragraph before the multi-classing example:
If the optional proficiency system is used, the character […] gains new proficiency slots at the fastest of the given rates.
which is reiterated on page 52, end of the first ...

On page 67 they are listed at #9 on the infernal hierarchy in the ranks of the greater devils. This is part of the general section on the Infernal Hierarchy.
Along with this text also on page 67.
Greater Devils. The greater devils include the pit fiends, erinyes, horned devils, and ice devils that command lesser devils and
attend the archdevils.
So ...

First off, Erik mentioned pulling in the god's domains, personality, and history. This is vital.
I would suggest having a couple of victory conditions:
kill the god
trap the god
heal the god
None of these should be easy, but all of them should be do-able. Of the three, trapping the god should probably be the easiest (it doesn't solve the problem, just ...

It's exceptional Strength, available only to warriors
Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition does indeed use the AD&D 2e rules as the chief designer confirmed.
In AD&D 2e, members of the Warrior group of classes (including fighters, rangers and paladins), with 18 Strength have what is called exceptional Strength.
This means that members of other classes ...

In fact, there is nothing in the rules that says you have to tell the player everything about the spell. It's unusual to omit the basic function, sure, but it's fine to let the player find out that a light spell, for example, causes sunburn after a while. And, in fact, the 1e DMG had a whole section detailing "secret" effects or details of many spells in the ...

Great answers so far. Let me add another factor.
AD&D tends to more more “challenge the player” instead of “challenge the character” than 3e and 4e. It also tends to be more rulings than rules than those editions. So, the question tends to be more whether the player is useful than whether the character are on par on paper.
This is really a play style ...

This is totally legit. If you're running a serious game, just let your players know that they don't know how the spell works beforehand (e.g. "The spell's magic is strange. It seems like it's probably an offensive evocation of some kind, but you aren't quite sure what the expected energy output will be like, nor why it has so many cross-dimensional ...

Is there some game balance concern at work here I'm not seeing?
Intention of the rules
Mages cannot wear armor, have only few hitpoints and are very restricted concerning weapons. This is for game balance reasons to offset their enormous magical potential. This balance considerations are explained by the fact that mages have no training at all with ...

These two games were written by different development teams at completely different companies (TSR vs. WotC), according to very different design philosophies (Gygax's1 vs. Tweet's).
Many things were changed when D&D 3e was written, not the least of which was abandoning backwards compatibility with previous material, something that had been more or less ...

The first edition Monster Manuals don't have a "table with monster level" - you are probably thinking of the random encounter tables from the 1e DMG Appendix C. Similarly, the random encounter tables are not found in the monster books themselves in 2e. In 2e, the DMG (Chapter 11) teaches you how to create random encounter tables rather than, frankly ...

It's not always the best choice. Depending on what your measure of "best" is, it may actually be a worse choice.
Pick specialty priest when you feel like the unique abilities are especially neat and that's what you want to play. In particular, there's no attempt at balance in the specialty priest options, so if that is part of one's measure of "best" then ...

The Item Is Deliberately Unclear
I'm using the description of the quartermaster's chest (XP 2,500; GP 12,500) from page 288 of the Encyclopedia Magica, Vol. 1 (1999) and that description jibes with the description provided here. If this information is different from that found in Dragon #178 (which I doubt), I'd go with Magica as it's the only reprint (I ...

I'm pretty sure that this is Code of the Rats from Shadis Issue #21. It's by Dave Dollar and ran around 30 pages according to the Shadis Index. (Search for 'rats'.) It's also referred to as "From Spuds to Studs" in RPG.net's article index.
(Billed on the cover as "The Only Introductory Fantasy Adventure You'll Ever Need.") It was:
Published in 1995.
In ...

Short version: It's all about the interpretation of "within one round of casting" in the spell description, and the DM's word is final.
Long version:
The start of the spell description for AD&D 2e Monster Summoning I says:
Within one round of casting this spell, the wizard magically conjures 2d4 1st-level monsters...
The only thing we can be sure ...

Monsters suffer no penalties for using all the attacks their entry grants them. You're correct that the two-weapon fighting penalties are limited to humanoids that have to learn how to fight with two weapons.
This is part of the general trend in TSR's D&Ds, from the original game up through AD&D 2nd edition, for monsters and PCs to operate by ...